Daily Digest - September 6: Five Years of Fiscal Failure

As the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse approaches, Paul Krugman reflects on the federal goverment's abject failure to pump enough money into the economy to create the jobs Americans desperately need, either at the outset of the Great Recession or in the five years since.

Roosevelt Take: Check out the video and proceedings from our conference on the jobs emergency, presented by the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative, to see experts discuss how we can turn this policy around.

Ylan Q. Mui notes that while Ben Bernanke's departure and the search for his successor might be grabbing most of the attention, fully half the members of the Fed's policy committee could leave next year, which raises doubts about how much stock we can put in the agenda they've set.

Want to Move Kids Out of Poverty? Then Protect the Middle Class (The Atlantic)

Jordan Weissman looks at a new study that finds American children have a much better chance of being able to escape poverty when there's actually a large and healthy middle class around for them to escape into, though class segregation in major metro areas also plays an important role.

A Map of Who's Got the Best (and Worst) Internet Connections in America (Gizmodo)

Reuben Fischer-Baum writes that the data on relative Internet connection speeds show that Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford is right: there is a deep communications inequality in the U.S., and it seems to be driven not just by geography or population density but by income levels.

24 Walmart Protesters Arrested at Demonstrations in New York and Los Angeles (HuffPo)

Caroline Fairchild writes that several protesters who tried to deliver their demands for better pay to a Walmart board member were led away in handcuffs, but a company spokesperson insists that the protesters aren't real Walmart employees anyway, except for the ones who are.

David Henry reports that JPMorgan Chase will no longer be accepting applications to its already-restricted private student loan program as of mid-October, having decided there's no room for growth in the market now that it has to deal with direct federal lending and increased oversight.

Paul Kiel notes that short-term, high-cost lenders in Texas are trying to get around new regulations on their shady business practices by offering borrowers zero-interest loans for nothing but the title to their car, and maybe something in the fine print about their firstborn. Don't worry about it.